Where She Planted Hydrangeas
By Tyree Daye
My grandmother migrated from South Carolina to North Carolina
with three children, a sister named Betty Lee,
and a best friend name Lue, they sailed here
and prayed God to line the highway with angels
whose wings could hide them from every evil thing,
on moonless roads, the stars gone missing.
They arrived like most black folk looking
for more than a field to turn over,
to find a dead turkey vulture's feathers
scorched under the truthful dirt,
its wings bent as if it died
saluting the dead rabbit it stood over.
What stood over them was a field the hands
will never stop touching.
They slept on homemade beds and ate over fires
out of a cast-iron pot.
A whole community gathered together in the woods
to pull wild onions, to pick pecans
off the cold ground.
All her dreams she scattered
like chicken feed across the yard,
my mother, aunts, and uncles ate
those chickens and they sowed those dreams into us.
I purpled under the windowsill of those lives.
Copyright Credit: Tyree Daye, "Where She Planted Hydrangeas" from Cardinal. Copyright © 2020 by Tyree Daye. Reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org.
Source: Cardinal (Copper Canyon Press, 2020)